The present invention relates to virtual machines of a cloud computing environment, and more specifically to smart virtual machine snapshotting.
A virtual machine (VM) snapshot is a “point in time image” of a virtual guest operating system in a cloud computing environment. The snapshot contains enough information about the VM that, in the case of a disk failure, service/application crash, etc., the machine can be successfully rebooted to that last point in time with minimal loss in data. Current implementations of snapshotting technology require an administrator to manually take the snapshots, or set the snapshots to be taken at certain intervals (i.e. every night at 11:00 pm or every 3 hours).